The Finishing School (11 page)

“Charlotte would give it to me, but she’s not happy about my running for office,” he said nonchalantly. She suspected he was lying, that he’d bled Charlotte dry already, that there was nothing left. But she had no way of knowing for certain.

“I’m only in this because of you,” she said heavily. That was actually true. Okay, Patricia was wearing a current-season Badgley Mischka to the gala, which naturally she couldn’t’ve afforded on the pittance Holbrooke paid her, but how much was that, really? Six thousand? Maybe a couple of thousand more when you threw in shoes, bag, hair, makeup. Nothing in the scheme of things. She could scrounge up that much in gifts by giving some rich parent the evil eye. She didn’t need to expose herself to hard time for a few baubles.

James drew an aggrieved breath, but she could feel him calculating on the other end of the line. Once all was said and done, she had the power to make him keep his word. If nothing else, she’d threaten to turn state’s evidence, the last best refuge of the woman scorned.

“Of course, darling,” he said finally. “We’re in this together. You know that.”

She felt faint with relief.

“What were you doing looking at the books anyway, silly? You could end up leaving an electronic trail if you’re not careful. And I need to hear about this problem you found. You probably just misread the numbers,” she said.

“I certainly hope you’re right. But I don’t want to talk about the details over the telephone.”

“So let’s meet. It’s been too long. I miss you.”

“This mess with Whitney is screwing everything up. I can’t leave the house. The police could be watching me. The press
definitely
are.”

“Why the police? You’re the grieving stepfather. They should be bringing you a cup of hot tea.”

“Are you kidding? They’d love to see me trip up. Melanie Vargas was all over me about the timing last night. Where was I, when did I call the police…?”

Patricia caught an undercurrent of something in his tone. “I thought you were at that Guggenheim thing,” she said suspiciously.

“Yes. Yes, I was.”

“So why was she asking you, then?”

“Who knows? You know how these people are. I’m surprised she didn’t ask
you
.”

“Let her. I was home with the doggies.” Patricia glanced over at Vuitton, who was napping. Coco was at the doggy shrink. Poor thing’s eating disorder was acting up again, the way it did every year as January 1 approached. They lived in a building that barred dogs weighing more than twelve pounds because they took up too much space in the elevators. The annual weigh-ins were disastrous for Coco’s body image, even though Patricia constantly reassured her there was no chance she’d hit the limit. Coco was tiny—barely eight pounds!

“So they searched?” James asked.

Patricia was distracted, her mind wandering to the bothersome question of where he’d been last night. “Hmm? What?”

“What did they search? They didn’t ask about the school’s computers, did they?”

“No. And I don’t see why they would. It was just the girls’ lockers they were interested in.”

“But you’d gone through Whitney’s—”

“Yes, of course!” she exclaimed irritably. “I came in at five to be sure nobody would see me. I went through everything, like you told me, all right? I left the innocuous stuff where they would find it so it wouldn’t look too obvious.”

“What do you mean? Was there anything you removed? Anything that
wasn’t
innocuous?”

Did he really have so little idea what his stepdaughter had been up to? He was surely playing dumb. After all, if he didn’t already know what was in there, why have her search? But she wouldn’t tell him what she’d found. She didn’t trust him these days; she needed something up her sleeve.

“No,” Patricia lied. “Just the usual teenager crap.”

“What about the other lockers? Did they find anything?”

“Yes indeed. As a matter of fact, they found heroin in Carmen Reyes’s locker.”

“Really?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Well.” He chuckled. “That’s fabulous. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“It makes so much sense. The little wetback with drugs in her locker. Just like I told them it would be. Now we can force them to stop investigating. Every second they’re out there poking around, you know, we’re at risk. And we don’t need any problems before Friday.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“I’m so glad we’re a team, darling.”

THEY AGREED THAT James would try to slip away and meet Patricia at her place later. The hours until then would be difficult ones. Normally she enjoyed the anticipation of waiting for a rendezvous with James. But not today; this security breach he was hinting about had her worried. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Had somebody
really
tampered with the second set of books? Was that possible, or was James lying? Testing her, maybe even screwing around with things behind
her
back and screaming bloody murder to cover his own tracks? Much as she adored him, she wouldn’t put anything past him. James was treacherous. She loved that about him; it was exhilarating. He really kept her on her toes. Patricia tapped her impeccably manicured fingernails on the desktop, thinking. She’d better damn well get to the bottom of the problem and figure out her next move. Here in the rarefied air at the tippy-top, it was play or get played.

And damn that Carmen Reyes, too, disappearing at just the wrong moment.

THE DRIVE BACK to Melanie’s office was slow because of holiday traffic, but not slow enough to come to terms with the evidence she held in her hand. A glassine bag, stamped GOLPE in red ink, sealed inside a clear plastic evidence envelope. Unlike the empty glassines recovered from Whitney Seward’s bedroom, this one still held its stash of grainy white powder. On the outside of the evidence envelope, Ray-Ray Wong had neatly printed his initials, the date, and the place of discovery: “Miss Holbrooke’s School. Locker of Carmen Reyes.”

Why was Melanie so disappointed? So what if Carmen was the one who’d corrupted her friends, who’d provided the heroin that killed them? What did Melanie care? She hadn’t even known the girl. Too often in life, the ugly, cynical explanation was the right one. She should just grow up and get used to that.

Ray-Ray dropped Melanie in front of her building and headed off to the DEA lab to get the heroin tested. She ran for the door, the bitter wind cutting right through her coat. The sky was an ugly grayish white, and she felt exhausted, cold to the bone, depressed. This case was pretty much over, and she didn’t like the way it was turning out, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Juan Carlos Peralta had been remanded to custody and was refusing to talk any further. They’d seized heroin from him and from Carmen’s locker. The only missing link—literally—was Carmen herself, who presumably would be found and arrested in short order. Juvie charges, but still enough to wreck her life and break her father’s heart. Melanie told herself she should just accept the evidence the way it was coming in. Yet something didn’t feel right.

There was a yellow Post-it stuck to her office door with a virtually illegible message scrawled on it. Melanie picked it off and squinted at it. Her best guess was: “Made arrest, 6th Floor, Dan.” Man, he had terrible handwriting. And,
mierda
, she was infatuated. Because learning that new fact about Dan made her feel all warm and gooey inside. His handwriting sucks, how cute!
Barf
. Melanie hung her coat on the rack, slapped herself lightly on both cheeks, and muttered, “Snap out of it,” under her breath. Only then did she go looking for him in the interview rooms on the sixth floor.

Dan and Bridget Mulqueen were debriefing a strange-looking kid Melanie didn’t recognize. Pale and pimply, with long brown dreadlocks, his face riddled with eyebrow and lip piercings, an angry line of Chinese characters tattooed down his left cheek. The second Melanie stuck her head in the room, Dan leaped to his feet and came outside to speak with her.

“Who’s
that
?” she asked. Dan pulled the door shut behind him and came to stand beside her—way too close to her, in fact. As if she didn’t already have enough trouble ignoring his looks, his height, the clean way he smelled. She took a step backward.

“Name’s Trevor Leonard,” Dan said. “We picked him up about an hour ago on a failure to appear. Kid had an outstanding warrant for wire fraud from some Internet hacking scam. Heard about it from Brianna Meyers’s mother.”

She nodded. “Oh, right, Trevor Leonard. The school psychologist at Holbrooke says he was Brianna’s boyfriend.”

“I’ll tell ya, he’s a fucking treasure trove of information about these girls.”

“So he’s talking?”

“Yup. I grabbed him on the warrant, and come to find out he had twenty tabs of ecstasy in his jacket pocket. With the drug charge piled on, he rolled in a heartbeat.”

“Great. I’ll sit in with you so we can lock him into a statement.”

“Yeah, sure, but one thing you should know first.” Dan moved even closer. He was leaning down, practically whispering in her ear. There was no call for it. Yes, they were standing right outside the interview room where Bridget held the prisoner. But the door was closed. Dan couldn’t reasonably think they would be overheard. Melanie took another step back, heart beating way too fast.

“What?”

“Bridget got Whitney Seward’s phone records already,” was all he said. “That wack job actually has good phone-company contacts, I’ll say that for her. Anyway, you’ll never guess who’s all over Whitney’s phones—cell
and
landline.”

“Who?” Melanie asked.

“Jay Esposito. That nightclub guy.”

“Right, the school psychologist mentioned him, too. Who
is
he?”

“Remember a few years back it was all over the papers? Wiseguy wannabe, owned a string of nightclubs, investigated for moving product?”

“Club drugs?”

“Nah, serious shit. Heroin, cocaine. I just talked to a guy I know on the squad that did the investigation. They were looking at Esposito for running a string of heroin mules. Moving Colombian product from Puerto Rico to New York.”

“But they never arrested him?”

“They were just about to go up on a wire on his phone when their main snitch got fished out of the East River. Minus his head, which they never found.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Esposito doesn’t fuck around. Since then, as you can imagine, nobody’s been willing to flip on the guy. You never hear about him, unless he’s in ‘Page Six’ with some model.”

“And you say he shows up in Whitney’s phone records?”

“Yeah, big time. We got numerous calls, including—get this—a call placed last night at nine-fourteen from the Sewards’ home telephone to Esposito’s cell phone, meaning Whitney called Esposito during the incident.”

“Or someone else called Esposito from her telephone,” Melanie pointed out.

“Excellent point, Counselor. You’re very smart, you know that?” He gazed at her, grinning. Was he flirting with her?

“Puerto Rico is an important transshipment point for Colombian narcotics, because it’s a domestic flight. No customs inspections,” she said hurriedly, blurting the first thing that popped into her head to quiet her fluttering heart. She was beginning to think she should’ve refused to work with Dan. Not that Bernadette had given her any option.

“Mmm-hmm.” He was still looking at her.

“You’re thinking maybe Esposito supplied the heroin that killed the girls?” Melanie asked.

“There’s another angle I’m just getting into with this kid, and it’s even beyond that. It’s gonna surprise you.”

BACK IN THE INTERVIEW ROOM, Bridget and Trevor Leonard sat next to each other on one side of the conference table, Bridget cradling her head on folded arms. She jerked up when Melanie and Dan walked in.

“Finally! I was getting tired of shooting the shit with Beavis here all by myself.”

“That’s not too secure a posture, Bridget,” Dan chided as he took a seat on the other side of the table.

“What? Kid’s a pussycat. Plus, he’s cuffed to the chair, right, Trev?”

Trevor didn’t say anything. Underneath his fearsome looks, he seemed vulnerable and young.

“How old are you, Trevor?” Melanie asked, sliding into the seat next to Dan. If Trevor was a juvenile, they shouldn’t be interviewing him without counsel and a parent present.

“Nineteen.” His eyes were an unusual yellowy green, like a cat’s, but wide and frightened.

“Oh, okay, good. You’re legally an adult under federal law. Have you been advised of your rights?”

“He signed a waiver,” Dan said, sliding a piece of paper toward her. Melanie glanced at it and nodded.

“I understand you were taken into custody on an outstanding warrant for fraud?” she asked.

“I was hacking. I sent out a game. If you were stupid enough to play it, it would invade your PC and steal some personal data. I didn’t ever
do
anything with the information. I was just, like, punking on people. Like, for kicks.”

“Unfortunately, it turns out that’s a federal crime, Trevor. You skipped out on your warrant, which makes it worse. Plus, when these agents arrested you, you had a distribution quantity of ecstasy in your possession,” Melanie said.

“Yeah, okay. A small amount, but enough to sell.”

“Twenty pills. Not nothing. So you’re facing some serious charges. Which gives you an incentive to talk to us, to get a more favorable plea offer. Now, have the agents explained what we’re interested in?” she asked.

“Yeah, they just told me Whitney Seward hot-loaded last night.”

“You hadn’t heard?”

“No. I’m not much for reading the papers. I told these guys what I know about Whitney. She was hooking up with this total psycho club-owner dude, like, old enough to be her father. Now,
he
moves product. That’s where you should be looking.”

“Jay Esposito?” Melanie asked.

“Expo. Yeah. He owns nightclubs and sells heavy-duty drugs. My thing is strictly like X or K—”

“Meaning ecstasy and ketamine?” Melanie asked.

“Right. Club drugs, you know? Go down easy, don’t fuck with your head too much. But Expo moves the real McCoy. We’re talking H. Not that Whitney Seward messing with hayron surprises me in the least. That girl was constantly pushing the envelope, looking for the next jones.”